The present invention relates to a system and method for alerting and tracking with improved confidentiality.
Several alarm systems including one or more sensors connected to a central unit are known. As a first example can be mentioned smoke and/or burglar detectors connected to a house central unit. Sensors for detecting smoke, movement, doors opened etc. may be connected to the house central unit by a cable or bus or via a wireless connection such as a radio or infrared transceiver, for example. The house central unit, in turn, may communicate with a security or alarm centre when a smoke detector or intrusion sensor is triggered. A second example is various sensors on a plane or ship which communicate with an emergency transmitter. When the sensors indicate a dangerous situation, a rescue or alarm centre may be notified automatically by means of the emergency transmitter.
A problem with such automatic alarm systems is the occurrence of “false” alarms caused by technical failures or triggered unintentionally. For example, the presence of dust may cause some smoke detectors to give off a signal, or a person having legitimate access to some premises may forget to deactivate an alarm system and thereby unintentionally activate an alarm. In the case of alarm systems which automatically call a monitoring centre, such a false alarm may lead to an unnecessary emergency turn-out. In the worst-case scenario, a false alarm could result in that rescue equipment is not readily available when a real danger situation arises.
Tracking systems are also known in which the users are provided with machine readable badges, such as cards used in entering and leaving a building, for example. Such systems may be useful when an alarm is triggered, e.g. in that they may be used by authorized persons to check that an office building has been evacuated or alternatively to identify any persons still located in the building. Similar systems could be used in boat or airplane traffic in that passengers and crew are provided with RFID chips, another type of transponder, or other suitable equipment. Due to privacy concerns, lists associating a chip/location with the identity of a person should only be made available for authorized personnel.
From US 2007/0008138 A1, a person and luggage monitoring system and method using RFID technology are known. According to this method and system, a person and his/her luggage are associated with each other by way of RFID chips. GB 2 431 495 A discloses a system for monitoring personnel on the bridge of a ship of which the objective is to reveal if personnel on watch are unavailable.
In principle, any ferry and passenger ship travel always involves a risk that passengers and crew may end up as missing after a shipwreck. In such cases, it is important to be able to track missing persons. At the same time, it is important to ensure privacy and confidentiality. An embodiment of the system described in the following may be introduced as a routine safety measure, for example, in sea passenger transport and similarly in other situations in which there is empirically a certain risk that a search for missing persons must be initiated in the case of an accident or the like. In such a case, the system needs to be reliable and make sure that only authorized personnel are able to access to certain information.
Hence, a need exists for an alarm system with a reduced risk of false alarms and greater reliability. There also exists a need for a system which ensures privacy and confidentiality issues in a better manner than do the current systems.
Thus, an object of the present invention is to provide an alarm system with improved integrity and confidentiality.